We generally need more than 30'' to question common sense about fondamentals concepts. Please, let you the necessary time to consider the following even if I am not known from most of you, and if the idea of barter is old and looks primitive.
A market place is where we can find the best price. To be compared, prices need to use a common value standard - which is a money. That's why most economist considers that a barter market place is impossible.
Economists also consider that "coincidence of wants" is rare with barter and not with money. This is true if we only consider bilateral relations. But the real potential of barter remains hidden.
Why barter market place is possible
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Let us define the price differently: the rate between provided and received quantities.
A price is defined for each couple (provided good, received good), and not simply for one good as we consider it usually.
Let us consider an example (not very interesting, but illustrative) with two partners.
When we say for example oranges are sold at 2$/kg, it is the price for the couple ($,Kg of orange), from the buyer's point of view. From the seller point of view, it is 0.5kg of oranges/$.
The equality of prices of buyer and seller has no meaning, but the product of prices has one: an agreement exists if this product is 1 (a non dimensional quantity). An agreement is also possible if the product of prices is >=1, and represents an opportunity for both buyer and seller.
A simple illustration of the situation is where, using traditional definition of prices, the buyer accept to by 3$/kg and where the seller accepts 1$/kg. the price of 2$/kg will be for them a win-win situation.
Now, let us consider a barter exchange between 3,4,5 peoples. This new definition of price is always effective, quantities being monetary, of goods or services. A group of exchange is also possible if the product of prices is >=1, an profit of the collaboration can be equally shared between partners.
participant can look for the best price by selecting the group of partners that will give him the best price as defined earlier.
A stock exchange that strengthens alternative economies
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This barter market place combines collaboration between partners and competition for the best price.
It can be used to create echanges between community currencies by bartering their own currencies, and make them free from dominants markets. It can be the stock exchange of community currencies.
When commitments of parners are more generous than necessary, the profit is equally distributed between the partners of exchange, and a barter contract is settled, where each partner gives to an other a given quantity of the stock he owns.
Details on how it works
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I am software engineer, and have now a model and algorithms that makes that search. The model defines stocks owned by participants and unilateral commitments to exchange their stocks at a given price. Groups are explored by using a mathematical representation called graph, where nodes are commitments and groups are cycles made by possible relations between commitments. I largely inspired my work from routing algorithms used in web routers to make this job.
I can give you more details if you request for it.
To make it real, we need to meet our strengths
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If you have a precise knowledge of economic actors that would accept to pay for the subscription on this "barter market place", please contact me.
It's not a single sofware programmer that will settle a barter market place trusted by a community of financial actors, where economic assets are exchanged with qualified security requirements. We need several steps to make it available.
The first step is the coding of an online demonstrator to make available the proof that the concept is operational. This system is not hardly secured nor ergonomic, but allows a participant to subscribe and login, deposit the description of stocks he owns, deposit unilateral commitments to prodive such stock in exchange of an other at such price, and where he can find draft barter contracts immedialty. I commit to make it for the 1st of January 2007 , if I receive a salary of 20 000$ before 15 th of October, to integrate the model and algorithm on a web site.
After this first go-nogo step, we need to associate skilled personnals, good wills, and capital riskers on a large software project to make the barter market place real. These skills are:
1) advices on management aspects (business plan writing, marketing, precise definition of needs to be satisfied, ...) 2) a software security expert (ssl, ...) 3) law consultant (contractual relations between participants and with the market place, ...) 4) software developer to make the site attractive, consider data integrity aspects, etc.Please, contact me if you think you have these skills, and interested to join the project.
We will also need the contribution of a community of beta-test users to improve and detect problems that never appear when the traffic is low (it is a pragmatic approach that has no theoretic reasons). Please contact me if you think the community you animate could respond to this need.
Excuse my poor english. I am waiting for your informations and propositions to this call directly on the following email.
olivier Chaussavoine. snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com